Two more Google engineers took the stand in the Oracle v. Google trial today, offering detailed testimony about how Android's Dalvik "virtual machine" works, while a parallel battle over what to do about the muddled first phase of the trial took place outside the jury's view.

A Pyrrhic copyright victory for Oracle?

Judge William Alsup kicked off the day with comments indicating that Oracle's win in the copyright phase might not amount to much. The jury's verdict was that Google did infringe Oracle's copyright, but it was split on Google's fair use defense.

Today, Alsup suggested that Oracle wouldn't be able to get anything for that beyond the statutory damages set by Congress for copyright infringement. Those damages max out at $150,000 per infringed work, a tiny fragment of what Oracle's legal fees must be in this case, which surely stretch into the millions of dollars.

Both sides have filed motions arguing what should be done about the muddled copyright outcome. Google has asked for an entirely new trial on the allegations of copyright infringement, saying that the jury's findings must be thrown out because it couldn't agree about fair use. Oracle's brief, filed this morning, argues that its copyright infringement win should be preserved, and if a new jury trial is needed, it should focus solely on the issue of fair use.

"Oracle has already painstakingly presented its case to the jury, which deliberated for a week before unanimously finding that Google infringed the SSO of the 37 Java API packages," Oracle lawyers wrote in a motion (PDF) filed this morning. "As the Seventh Amendment recognizes, the Court should not undo these diligent efforts."

Oracle has suggested that it should be entitled to some of Android's profits because of the one point on which it had a clear win—Google's copying of a nine-line function called rangeCheck(). Alsup, however, was dismissive of that proposal when Oracle's attorney brought it up in court, and the motion Oracle filed on Tuesday making the same argument seems like a long shot.

Meanwhile, Judge Alsup has continued to delay ruling on arguably the most important point—whether APIs can be copyrighted at all. If Google were to win that point, the arguments over what to do next will become mostly a moot point

Jurors hear nuts-and-bolts testimony on Dalvik

Two Google engineers who already testified during the copyright phase were called back to the stand today. One was Dan Bornstein, the technical lead on the five-person team that created the Dalvik virtual machine. Bornstein, wearing clear-framed glasses and a green Android lapel pin, testified about the tools he built to turn Java bytecode into code that could be read by Dalvik. (Bytecode is a type of "intermediate" code used by both Java and Android.)

Much of the testimony today was feuding over tedious details about wording, such as whether particular elements of programming involved "symbolic references" or "numeric references."

Even though independent invention isn't a defense in patent cases, Google's lawyers did take the time to highlight the originality of the Android creators.

"Was Dalvik built from open source [code]?" asked Google's lawyer.

"The main Dalvik code base was written from scratch," said Bornstein. "It was really Google engineers working on it."

Dan Bornstein getting served with a subpoena

Dan Bornstein

Bornstein—who posted a photo of himself on Google+ with his process server when he received a subpoena last week—also explained to the jury how he named Dalvik after a town in Iceland. "I had just finished reading a book of Icelandic fiction, and I guess I had Iceland in the back of my head," he said.

Another engineer heavily involved in Dalvik, Andy McFadden, also testified today about the inner workings of how Dalvik operated.

By the end of the day, even Alsup seemed to tire of the detailed technical testimony. "Tell us where we're going to wind up on this long, tortuous road," he asked Google attorney Matthias Kamber.

"We're trying to illustrate the process of field resolution," answered Kamber.

"How long is this going to take?" Alsup asked.

"I was going to suggest we break here," Kamber said.

"Well I think that's a grand idea," Alsup said, to light laughter on all sides.